On the closing day of the AI Engineer World's Fair, industry leaders debated whether loops are ready for mainstream use and whether humans still have a place in coding.
On the loops-now side, Geoff Huntley, founder of Latent Patterns, was understandably bullish. He said that over two years ago he was at Canva and watched engineers prompting repeatedly and realized that this could be done much more efficiently with a software loop.
"It's somewhat inevitable," he said. "It is not a complete silver bullet. This time next year, at the conference we're going to see a whole bunch of talks saying our factories fail, our loops fail. These are things that we are yet to figure out."
He likened the situation to the first deployments of Kubernetes, where it took the industry years to get deployment right. But when they did, it was a revolution.
Dex Horthy, CEO of HumanLayer, was less enthusiastic. Earlier in the week, he gave a keynote in which he described how — as an experiment — he'd taken humans out of the coding loop and let machines do the job. He monitored the results, and they weren't good. He felt it was clear that AI wasn't up to the job yet.
